Middle School

Learn about FIRST, how Francis Parker participates in FIRST Robotics culture, and see the 2016 FRC Stronghold robot known as Orion in action.

We will have a series of hands-on instant challenges for kids and adults to solve. Our booth will be colorful, have creative displays and information about our program. Instant Challenges present students with a problem and some common materials (paper clips, paper, envelopes etc.). Students must solve the challenge in a quick and creative way. Destination Imagination's mission is to inspire the next generation of innovators, leaders and creative thinkers.

The UCSD Near Space Ballooning team sponsored by CaSGC will be displaying informational and educational material regarding high altitude ballooning. Also exhibiting will be electronic equipment such as radio transmitters, cameras, satellite navigation systems, and a glider which can all be payload components recording atmospheric data. From past events, we've seen a growing interest from educators and families interested in launching their own balloons due to material accessibility.

The City's Ocean Monitoring Program booth will have preserved marine invertebrates and fish on display. As well there will be a "fishing game" for children to teach them what is and is not sustainable sea food. We will be running a video loop of our ROV operations and our Benthic Sampling processing at sea. We will have a cable hanging with water sampling bottles attached to demonstrate how samples are collected for h2o quality analysis.

Our booth will be two tents. One is a workshop and the other is a "Walk-in-Painting" (based on a scientific topic) where public art created in our workshop tent, will be added to our interactive installation. This booth will be designed, built and ran by the students of Julian Charter School, San Diego Academy.

Microbes are all around us! Microscopic living organisms thrive in the depths of the ocean, to the most familiar of places like our food. The less than 1% that cause disease give microbes a bad reputation, but a majority have no or even a positive effect on humans. Stop by for an all-ages interactive experience on the microbes in our life! Brought to you by UCSD scientists currently studying the diverse way microbes can interact (on cheese!), engineering microbes to produce fuel, and more.

The UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center for Treatment and Research and the Center for Healthy Eating and Activity Research (CHEAR) are teaming up to recruit for various research studies on healthy eating and skill-based learning. Our research integrates brain imaging modalities to understand brain structure and function in eating disorders. CHEAR develops and provides treatments for promoting healthy eating and weight management to children, adolescents, adults through science and innovation.

A variety of NASA's planetary and Earth science missions, including Mars Science Lander, Jupiter orbiter Juno, and asteroid orbiter Dawn, will bring displays, exhibits, and hands-on activities to engage students and adults.

The Center for Selective C-H Functionalization will have a booth for the Expo Day with simple demos to educate K-12 students and beyond about synthetic organic chemistry. We will have Center graduate students volunteering for 2 hr shifts to engage with the participants. The demos are designed to be 2-3 minutes.

We will have several hands on demonstrations to provide participants with a view of the scale of the universe as well as the methods we use to observe it. Activities will include play-dough planets to build scale models of the solar system, an activity illustrating gravitational lensing, and some models and experimental devices from the lab to show the ins and outs of modern telescopes. We will also have an informational poster describing the ongoing research activities at CASS.